"Location trigger" / Geofencing

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Hi,

I am using the Windows Phone app/Vera Edge, and trying to get it to turn on “Away” mode when we leave the building - that part is working. But it it supposed to turn on “Home” mode when me or someone else returns home, and that is not working so it results in a lot of warning messages. Anyone who knows how to fix this?

/Magnus

2

At last check, the native geofencing function does not work for TWO phones in vera. It kinda, sorta works sometimes with one phone. Your mileage may vary.

Yes, they know about it and say they are working on it.

There are other options that have been used by the more learned among us. I will let them explore those options with you. Instructions from me will just get you lost in Detroit. That’s a bad thing.

3

Hi,

I am using a multi switch and have scenes on each phone where the enter/exit events from the Vera Andriod app select/unselect one of the buttons per phone. When one or more are selected I set Home, when none are selected I set Away. It looks to be running quite stable for a few weeks now.

You will have to create the entry/exit scenes (i.e. two per phone) on the Web GUI with a manual trigger so you can set the multi switch control properly as you cannot do that from the Vera Phone app. Once you have that working switch to the phone app and set the trigger for the scenes to the entry/exit of the geofence as you cannot do that from the web GUI. Note that the moment you set the trigger to a phone app location, the scene will no longer show on the web GUI. So if you need to change it, you will have to remove the location trigger via the app, update the scene via the web GUI and reapply the location trigger. Annoying behaviour I reported, so maybe they fix it.

I attached the code I use for it. it should work for up to four phones (tested with two). It has an extra check for the Home status by doing a ping to a phone in case you want to do that. It can save on a false away status. Initially I had the occasional false away trigger on the phone app when the phone was just in a single spot at home, but that has not occurred for a few weeks now. To use the ping check option, you must configure your wifi router to always assign the same IP address to your phones. If you do not want to use the ping option, simply leave the IP addresses empty (“”).

I also have an ‘Office’ status for when working from home, so there is some coding for that. Right now this code does not set the Vera build in Home/Away status, but that can simply be added if you like. I hope you can use this to start your own multi-phone solution.

Cheers Rene

4

Thanks for the tip! I will try it!